THREE
Eight-twenty A.M.
Anxious, her curly hair still damp from the shower, Rita arrives at the newspaper office. She wears a flowing summer skirt and a sleeveless blouse.
Dr. Abraham Ferracuti has died.
She heard the news five minutes ago on the bus, when they interrupted the musical programming for a special news update.
She looks for Matías, the news editor, but he hasn’t arrived yet.
El Zompopo hurries in with his camera dangling from his neck.
“I’m on my way over there right now,” he says.
She asks him to wait a second, takes her tape recorder from her desk, grabs her walkie-talkie, and runs after him.
They get into the Volkswagen Beetle. Víctor, one of the newspaper’s drivers, is at the wheel.
“Where are we going?” he asks.
“Towards the volcano, past Escandón,” El Zompopo tells him.
Rita is in the back seat, chewing her nails. Ferracuti’s death has just wrecked the angle she was working for her article for the Sunday supplement. She’ll have to rethink it now. Shit!
“The snakes again,” the driver says.
“But there were shots fired, too. There was a confrontation,” El Zompopo answers.
Maybe one of those disgusting snakes died, she thinks to herself. She hates them. She doesn’t know what she’d do if she ever saw one. Probably die of fright.
“Your pictures of the gas station came out great,” she compliments El Zompopo, pointing at the newspaper she’s leafing through. Last night, when she finally managed to get to the scene, the firefighters had nearly finished putting out the flames.
A helicopter flies over the slope of the volcano.
The street in front of Dr. Ferracuti’s house is blocked off. There are police cars, the forensic unit’s van, and luxury cars on the scene.
They hurry out of the Volkswagen. They pass police officers and bodyguards. An absent-minded officer asks to see their press passes, as if he doesn’t know who they are.
El Zompopo takes pictures indiscriminately. The bodies are still fresh. Rita notices that the narcotics squad appears to be taking charge of the case. The DICA chief and his team of maniacs are moving around as if they’re going to cordon off the crime scene.
Her colleagues from Radio Red, Sistema YSA and Canal 12 are there. Her competition from El Gráfico hasn’t arrived yet. She looks around for Jonás and Arturo, the other two reporters assigned to the case by Ocho Columnas.
She walks over to Deputy Commissioner Handal. He’s talking to Chele Pedro. Detective Flores stops her.
“The boss can’t make any statements now.”
Things are heating up.
The Police Commissioner himself comes through the front gate. She tries to approach him, tape recorder in hand, but his bodyguards stop her.
The Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner Handal, and Chele Pedro stand around Dr. Ferracuti’s body, near the front door.
“He killed them all,” Detective Villalta says in her ear. She flinches. She didn’t see him coming.
Mirna and Epaminondas from El Gráfico arrive, followed by more colleagues.
“The wife, both girls, three maids, the security guard, the driver, and the bodyguards,” Villalta whispers. “Ten in total, including the doctor. A total massacre.”
The lead officers go into the house. The journalists have to wait outside, prowling around the bodies, the garage, and the garden, waiting to be let inside.
She looks at Dr. Ferracuti’s body. A really good-looking man, she thinks, but the way he’s laid out makes him look pathetic.
“It looks like they all died of snakebites,” El Zompopo whispers to her.
“What about the shots?” she asks, turning to look at Villalta.
“The bodyguard emptied his submachine gun,” the detective explains. “We think he was shooting at the yellow Chevrolet, because of all the glass on the ground. But there’s no blood trail.”
There’s another commotion at the scene. The Minister of National Security himself has arrived: Dr. Ferracuti had been mentioned as a probable presidential candidate for the governing party.
The reporters swarm the minister, but the sour-faced cripple walks right into the house without stopping. Rita doesn’t even try to get close to him. She’s hated that conceited jerk ever since he publicly scolded her.
It looks like the yellow Chevrolet burst onto the property in a well-timed assault, Villalta explains to her. As soon as the security guard opened the automatic gate, the car ran him over and crashed into the Mercedes Benz to stop it. The security guard managed to react, but the snakes were quicker.
Rita’s walkie-talkie squawks. It’s Matías, the news editor, anxiously asking for details. She tells him that with the death of Ferracuti, the case has taken a new turn and they’ll have to find a different angle for the story. He says the shit must have really hit the fan if the Minister felt obliged to come to the crime scene. He orders her to get back to the office right away.
She approaches Villalta again.
“So the stuff about Jacinto Bustillo is down the drain, right?” she asks, biting her nails.
He shrugs his shoulders.
El Zompopo sketches a diagram with the location of the bodies and the Mercedes Benz in his notepad so that the graphics guys won’t complain that they don’t have enough information.
The lead officers come out of the house.
The Minister steps forward and announces that the government will respond to this terrorism with the full force of the law against whoever perpetrated it; that Dr. Ferracuti was one of the most distinguished citizens in the country and that the President has ordered that a special committee be formed and led by the Police Commissioner to investigate the crimes committed by the snakes and the psychopaths who control them.
“Minister, was there an orchestrated plan, a conspiracy, behind these snake attacks?” asks Omar, the reporter from Radio Red, a young guy too interested in getting along with government officials for Rita’s taste.
The Minister says it’s still too early to make assumptions, but it wouldn’t surprise him if certain suspicious groups were using an insane snake charmer for their own criminal ends. He heads towards the street, surrounded by bodyguards.
Rita confronts the Police Commissioner.
“Commissioner, why the Ferracuti family? Are the crimes related to the Doctor’s possible nomination for the presidency?”
He can’t reveal anything that may hinder the investigation, he answers, frowning. And reporters won’t be allowed to go inside the home out of respect for the Ferracuti family, he adds.
“One of the daughters was naked,” Villalta whispers to Rita, rubbing his jaw, a lustful look on his face.
Jonás and Arturo run over.
“We got lost,” says Jonás. He’s clumsy and skinny, and has a habit of stroking his moustache at the slightest provocation.
They’ve both been assigned to the story. They’re covering the facts, the timeline and the background; she’s writing the in-depth reports.
Handal and Chele Pedro follow the Commissioner out.
“Has Narcotics taken over the case?” she asks Villalta.
No, not at all. Didn’t she just hear that they were going to form a special committee led by the Commissioner himself? It’s even possible that staff from the State Intelligence Department, the President’s own organization, will be involved in the investigation.
She has to get back to the office right away to talk to Matías and get organized. If not, it’ll be impossible to structure her article. El Zompopo says he’ll stay behind with Jonás and Arturo to wait and see if they can get inside the house.
Roger was right, she thinks, as she climbs into the Volkswagen. This is much more complicated than she’d thought, and now there are nationwide consequences. They argued about it last night after she’d come home from work, shaken by the events at the gas station and at Agent Raúl Pineda’s house.